New Idea has unveiled a bolder and brighter new multi-platform look – to coincide with one of this year’s most anticipated stories, the engagement of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle.
The revamp, “Colourful Moments”, unifies design across all of New Idea’s channels and gives the country’s best-loved women’s media brand a more sophisticated look and feel, with a new colour palette, new fonts and flagship lifestyle sections such as Royals, food, beauty, fashion and health re-energised in both digital and print.
Louisa Hatfield, general manager, entertainment and family, comments: “With a multi-platform footprint of five million every month – more than any other Australian women’s brand – New Idea’s power to entertain and connect with such a huge community of Australian women is stronger than ever.
“Our readers have an enduring love affair with the Royals and, true to form, New Idea was one of the first news sites in the world with the engagement news last night. The power of our brand is that our team of talented content creators understand intimately what our audience love – and we want them to be able to navigate this content easily.
“Colourful Moments”, our new multi-platform brand experience, has been crafted to improve the user’s content journey with less clutter, a more polished feel throughout and a more visually consistent experience across all devices.”
New fonts include a mix of modern handwritten type and a fresh selection of traditional typefaces, alongside a new photographic creative direction influenced by both social media and red carpet trends. Food content has been simplified to make recipes easier to read, a more classic edge is introduced to beauty content, whilst health becomes colour themed with a focus on uplifting the reader.
Launching today, a redesigned homepage provides users with a more sophisticated, premium experience with an emphasis on ensuring new and returning users are served with a fast, intuitive, tailored content feed with seamless integration for commercial partners. Design-thinking underpins the development of the entire site with a view to optimising web experiences, whilst data and event tracking guides usability improvements with A/B and multivariate testing to assess user engagement, time on site and page views.
In advance of today’s launch, New Idea’s page speeds have decreased by 38 per cent over the past two months, improving UX and ad viewability, reducing bounce rate, whilst improving search rankings.
Will Everitt, head of product and technology comments: “The clean, immersive new design for New Idea optimises the user’s journey with better digital storytelling via simple, punchy visuals and a mix of fun, intriguing, fresh content.
“Call to actions are strong and on-brand with native styling to maximise conversion, the user interface is customer centric throughout and we proudly go to market with a best-in-class proposition which optimises the long-term value of both our audience and commercial relationships.”
New commercial packages include non-intrusive, efficient and high-value approaches for serving fewer yet higher impact ads, including the all-new premium homepage takeover option. To mark the launch of the brand’s revamped visual experience, New Idea’s home page today showcases the new takeover execution.
Frances Sheen, editor, New Idea, said: “The New Idea consumer runs a whole household on $80,000 a year, has two or three kids, does the supermarket shop and cooks seventy to eighty per cent of the time. She’s increasingly running the family finances and does most of the child care. And in between all of that, she goes to work. Make no mistake – this woman deserves to be entertained – and she knows just where to turn for it with New Idea.
“Our audience adore Prince Harry and his bride to be, Meghan. Ahead of the Spring wedding next year, New Idea will be in London and will bring our audience all the exciting details in the build up to the Spring ceremony.”
